The purpose of this paper is to assess comparative efficiency in water and sanitation sector in Brazil. We run a Sthocastic Frontier Analysis model for a panel of 127 providers, covering more than 70% of urban population of the country. We search and find an explanation for cost efficiency, and...

We analyze by means of frontier methods (input requirement function) the relative energy efficiency of urban water and sanitation providers in Brazil. We estimate energy savings through measures the sector could implement on variables which control. We find a 63 percent efficiency average, with...

We study the efficiency of the Argentine banking service after a crisis in 2001-2002. The financial system started in practice from zero and recovered jointly with the economy, but its productivity and average cost levels are stagnated since 2007. The analysis encompasses efficiency frontiers of...

Prior to the 2008 global credit crisis, some developments had occurred in the regulation of the insurance industry worldwide. At different speeds, the world was heading toward a more risk-based solvency regulation and some convergence on principles and criteria. We see a common thread in the...

In this paper, it is shown the relationship between coverage in water and sanitation, and hydric disease’s incidence. There are synthesized the situations of the more affected regions and there are presented the Millennium Development Goals on the subject. Briefly, there are summarized the...

With an early welfare system, Argentina’s demography is more similar to the South European countries than to the majority of Latin American ones. The country reformed its old fashioned Pay-As-You-Go system in the 1990s, introducing a Fully Funded scheme, which was intended to solve the...

Corporate governance could be defined as the institutions or mechanisms, which induce incentives in listed firms, in order to recognize benefits between all the stakeholders, and to restrict the discretion over that distribution, in presence of asymmetric information and incomplete contracts....

Does a small economy benefit from having local financial intermediaries? If "yes", then what can be done to ameliorate the performance of local financial intermediaries? This article it is made a review on theoretical and empirical literature related with both questions. Two strands of the...

The aim of this work is to present in a systematic way elements around the debate on the persistence of a central bank arrangement, currency boards or the Dollarization option. In some special circumstances, both later arrangements could be desirable. They are not a universal panacea in the way...

The objective of this article is to present in a systematic war elements to debate the persistence of the option for central banks, against its replacement by currency boards or by a foreign currency in unstable environments. Both, currency boards or "dollarization" could be desirable since the...